


As I there dreamed of dying leaves

by Nymphaeus



Series: SephirothWeek 2020 [2]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Autumn, Being Lost, Fear, Fear of Death, Forests, Gen, Ghosts, Gothic Setting, Hallucinations, Lost in the Woods, Nature, POV Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII), Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII)-centric, Sephiroth Appreciation Week 2020, Soft Ending, Spooky, The Sleeping Forest (Compilation of FFVII), Walks In The Woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphaeus/pseuds/Nymphaeus
Summary: Sephiroth Appreciation Week 2020 - Day 2: Lost"Sephiroth didn’t know how long he had been walking. The forest seemed to be expanding endlessly in front of him.Wherever he turned, gnarled, bony trees stretched towards a murky sky. As far as he could see, the forest floor was a grotesque patchwork of bare branches, rotting leaves and the last remnants of snow that had fallen a few days ago."A mission into the vicinity of the Sleeping Forest causes Sephiroth to fall under its spell. Wandering alone through the gloomy woods, he experiences emotions he had long thought dead.
Relationships: Angeal Hewley & Sephiroth
Series: SephirothWeek 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1982950
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	As I there dreamed of dying leaves

**Author's Note:**

> Here it is! Day 2!
> 
> This one was inspired by even more scholarly reading I did, this time on nature and landscapes in Gothic fiction.  
> Also, I am really getting into to the fall/Halloween spirit! It's my favourite time of the year.
> 
> I tagged Angeal, even though he is barely in the fic, just in case anyone hates Angeal with a burning passion - even though I personally can't see how anyone could - and therefore wants to avoid him at all costs. 
> 
> Enjoy some mildly spooky, autumn forest vibes!

Sephiroth didn’t know how long he had been walking. The forest seemed to be expanding endlessly in front of him.  
  
Wherever he turned, gnarled, bony trees stretched towards a murky sky. As far as he could see, the forest floor was a grotesque patchwork of bare branches, rotting leaves and the last remnants of snow that had fallen a few days ago.  
  
Dusk had for a while cloaked the landscape in velvety flames, but when the last rays of sunlight had vanished, they seemed to have drained all the colour from the thicket. Now, the whole world looked eerily pale, void of almost any saturation – a desolate wasteland for a lone wanderer.  
  
If Sephiroth was being honest, he could barely remember if there ever had been something like a sunset to begin with. Whenever he tried to remember what the forest had looked like during daylight hours, the images slipped right through his mind, leaving barely anything of substance, but the vague feeling that there was something he had forgotten.  
  
Underneath his boots mouldy leaves and fallen branches were crunching meekly, but in the eerie silence of the night each and every small rustle he made seemed to sound loudly from the surrounding trees, echoing dangerously through the emptiness.  
  
After a while, he could barely remember beginning his walk. He didn’t know where he was going either. Out. That was the logical conclusion. He was trying to find a way out. He must be looking for a way out, even when he had no recollection of how he had gotten here. No matter where he turned – and he had turned often – there was no clear pathway to follow. Sometimes he thought, he could spot some sort of a path in the near distance, but whenever he approached the spot with fast steps, reaching it with restless anticipation, there was nothing to be found, but more forest and more brush and patches of mud-soiled snow and he would walk on with growing frustration.  
  
From time to time his pants would get caught in the thorny thicket of the underbrush, tearing at the fabric and scratching at his skin, as he defiantly made his way further into the forest.  
  
He must have been walking for hours on end, but the forest didn’t seem to get darker, as it should with the night fast approaching. The sun had set, but it seemed as if the world around him, was eternally caught in that final moment of monochromatic twilight, before the dark would ultimately swallow the woods for good. Perhaps it hadn’t been hours. Even though, Sephiroth was sure, it had been.   
  
Occasionally, the cold night air would rise up in whisps of playful winds, howling through the treetops, and rustling the dried-up leaves still clinging to the otherwise barren branches. The self-same breeze would then be mischievously toying with his hair, like a ghostly lover’s hand, brushing spectral fingers through silver strands and teasing the short hairs at the back of his neck, he even thought he could hear it chuckle with amusement at his plight. He was shivering.  
  
Stubbornly, Sephiroth walked on and on. The forest never seemed to grow denser. The forest never seemed to change at all. The trees were different trees, the little bizarre cracking noises everywhere, the swooshing and rustling around him frequently shifted and changed directions, but there was no way out in sight.  
  
There was no end and no beginning to this forest. There was no use of turning back. Sephiroth was still a way off from admitting that he didn’t know what to do, that he had lost direction and that – maybe – he had never had it to begin with.  
  
Suddenly, he felt the yanking pain of someone grabbing at his hair, pulling harshly and he spun around, heart hammering in his chest, he expected to see – someone. Something. Anything. There was nothing there. A strand of his hair had gotten caught in a viny growth that was slung around the body of a crooked tree in a desperate embrace.  
  
Entrapped in his own thoughts, he must have failed to notice how close he had gotten, even though he could swear, there hadn’t been a tree when he had last looked forward to where he was heading. Carefully, but with swift fingers, Sephiroth disentangled the strands from the brittle remains of the plant, grateful that he was wearing gloves, or he might have pricked himself on its thorns. They looked sharp. They had felt sharp when they had grasped at his hair.  
  
His heart was still beating loudly in his chest, he could feel the blood thrumming in his ears, momentarily even drowning out the howling of the winds that was now a constant companion.  
  
What strange thoughts to have. Had he seriously lost his nerve and gotten spooked over an old tree and some dead vines? It was laughable. And Sephiroth did laugh – cold and dry, like this maze he couldn’t seem to escape. It was nothing but ridiculous, that he should be in this situation, without knowing how he got here or how he would be getting out of it. So, he kept laughing until it turned hysterical and his vocal-chords gave out. When the last sobs of his frenzied laughter had ceased, the wind and the leaves in the treetops were all too eager to resume their haunting duet.  
  
Sephiroth drew in a shaky breath, the cold air burning in his lungs. Absentmindedly, he brushed a single tear from his cheek and kept on walking, because what else was he supposed to do.  
  
As he ventured deeper, spectres began to flicker in the corners of his eyes. At first, Sephiroth pretended not to notice them at all. He brushed them off as mere figments of a weary mind and an imagination animated by the, admittedly, creepy atmosphere of an aimless walk through an unknown forest.  
  
They became harder to ignore, persistent and with growing frequency, they would appear on the farthest edges of his vision, as figures of shadow and static. At times, he would even imagine voices whispering out from somewhere close behind, but whenever he gave in and turned, there was nothing there – nothing, but skeletal trees stretching for miles and miles across the land and towards the sky – and the lingering sensation of someone’s gaze upon his back.  
  
There were more strange thoughts to be had still and even more acres of forest to walk. Maybe the forest really was limitless. Maybe, he would walk and walk and eventually his legs would just give out and he would fall to never get up again and wither away in silence to become part of the underbrush like all the other unfortunate souls that had died in here. Maybe that was why he was here. Something had lured him in, only so that he could die and nourish the hungry organism that were these woods.  
  
And surely, didn’t the branches begin to take on the shape of bony fingers reaching for him? As they had done so before? The wind was singing its ghastly melody, tugging urgently on his mantle and his hair, beckoning him to venture deeper, to lose himself in this labyrinth of rot, mud, decay and dead things which autumn had killed, and winter had buried.  
  
Sephiroth forced himself to take another deep breath, no matter how much it hurt in his airways. In fact, he forced himself to take in more and more, filling his aching lungs with as much air as they would let him, putting steady strain against his ribcage. The pain might burn the weird thoughts right out of his head. Shuddering, he released the air – and surely, the pain did help to fight off some of the worst of it. But, Sephiroth couldn’t shake the feeling of how wrong the world around him felt.  
  
The forest, with its monochrome hues, the distant noises that echoed too close for comfort, the spectral figures in his vision and the nebulous thoughts Sephiroth had a hard time accepting as his own, they all felt slightly off, hazy and blurred – as if in a dream.  
  
A dream. He must be dreaming. He could feel the hysteric laughter rising in his throat again. If he was in a dream, then all he had to do was wake up. It sounded easy. Wouldn’t recognizing he was dreaming be enough? Sephiroth tried to concentrate on his physical body, that must be asleep somewhere in the real world, but he only felt the wind on his skin, on _this_ skin and the afterburn of freezing air in his lungs. Perhaps, if he could remember what he had done before he went to sleep, where he was – but the answer didn’t come. The last thing he remembered was walking through a forest. There was no before. A vicious sense of dread settled deep in his stomach and made it drop. Why couldn’t he remember? Almost as in trance, he began to walk faster, overcome by an overwhelming sense of urgency.  
  
It had been such a long time since Sephiroth had last experienced this feeling. He almost hadn’t recognized it for what it was – it had faded so far into the background since his childhood. He had felt traces of it, when he had first been sent onto his earliest missions into actual war zones. These days, Sephiroth had deemed himself incapable of feeling it. Sephiroth did not dare speak its name, for he wouldn’t know what it would do to him if he acknowledged it. At the same time, his ghostly watchers seemed to be drawing nearer. It was not like he could clearly see them, but he felt it, as a prickling sensation on his skin, in the fast pace of his beating heart, somehow he knew, that they were closing in on him.  
  
Sephiroth began to jog, then to run and soon he was sprinting through the woods, dodging trees and ripping his garments on scrubs, but he didn’t care, his mind was spurred on by nothing but the need to escape.  
  
He ran on, on and on, until he – with what seemed to be the last bit of strength he had left – stumbled into a moonlit clearing.  
  
Sephiroth’s lungs were aching, his heart was racing, his legs were weak and trembling and the saliva that had gathered in his mouth left the faint taste of metal on his tongue. He coughed, once, twice – spitting the excess fluid onto the floor. He immediately threw a nervous glance over his shoulders and into the darkness behind him, looking out for pursuers that weren’t there. There was no one there, he repeated to himself, trying to internalize the meaning and failing to convince himself.  
  
On trembling legs, he stepped into the midst of the clearing. The sky above devoid of stars, but a gloomy moon was shining its milky light over the scenery. The clearing itself wasn't large, barely enough to deserve the name, as it was hardly more than a spot with a noticeable absence of trees, but at least it was proof that despite everything, Sephiroth had been going somewhere – anywhere.  
And it invited him to stay and rest his weary body for a while. As much as there was any semblance of rest to be found under the given circumstances. More disturbingly, the longer he rested, the more that uneasy feeling crept back again, that he better lay down here and let it all end, that it would be okay – that it would be best. Fatigue had settled deep in Sephiroth’s bones and his muscles were sore and aching, his whole body throbbed with a dull pain that did no longer fade. If he stayed, he would fall asleep and rot away.  
  
But there was also the heightened alarm that he was being watched from the shadows, that sent thrills down his spine. He couldn’t let his guard down, not even for a second. Somewhere behind the dense curtain of trees lurked a sinister presence, out to get him – of that he was now sure – and exposed like this, he would be easy prey for anything only waiting for an opportunity to devour him whole. If he stayed, it would get to him, as much was promised by the mocking whispers picking up with the winds.  
  
He couldn’t stay. Sephiroth was shaky and tired, but he needed to press on. He could make it out of this nightmare, eventually, if he just continued onward and so he would. Even, if he was hunted, haunted and fending for himself, he needed to find his way out.  
  
Without looking back – not wanting to risk seeing something, he would rather not see – Sephiroth left the clearing behind. A faint mist had begun to creep over the barren earth.  
  
He had been walking for at least another hour, or so he assumed. In actuality, he had no idea how much time had passed. There was still the vague apprehension, which he tried to suppress, that time was not moving forward at all.  
  
All the while, he was desperately trying to ignore the flickering apparitions which now formed and vanished and reformed so close to him, that every time he caught one in the corner of his eye, he expected it to be the time they would finally descend upon him – but they never did. Every time a piece of his clothing ripped on the underbrush, he jumped, always expecting to have finally been caught – but he never was. He could now clearly hear, that they whispered his name, from treetops and out of the thicket, they were calling to him. Sephiroth could still feel the chill touch of faint fingers on his skin, but it was nothing but the now familiar caress of the wind. The temperature had dropped significantly and after holding off for quite a while, Sephiroth had to give in and wrap his arms around himself in an attempt to retain some form of warmth, but it was only to his frustration and to no significant avail. He was shaking, from the cold and the exhaustion, and something else, he dared not name.  
  
Straight ahead, that was his focus. Long had he given up on trying to find way markers. Everything looked the same. He could tell the trees were different, or at least, he thought he could. So, when he found himself suddenly standing in another clearing, he took it as a sign that the woods were finally thinning out, but then he made the mistake of looking up at the moon and the stars that were not there and found it at the exact same position he had spotted it in earlier. In fact, everything about the clearing looked oddly familiar. A thought which made his blood run cold and Sephiroth immediately fastened his steps and crossed the clearing with long strides.  
  
The fog was growing thicker. Heavy and drowsy, it billowed over the forest floor, swallowing everything in its wake, lapping greedily at his boots. It was rising quickly, as well. Only a short while after Sephiroth had left the second clearing behind, it was already threatening to reach past his knees. This time, Sephiroth did not try and take note of how long he had been walking. An hour? Two hours? Maybe it had only been minutes. He was gritting his teeth against the ever-dropping temperature. It had been a while and he was getting nowhere. Once or twice he could have sworn he had heard a wispy voice right next to his hear, whispering something other than his name, something more, that he could almost understand, if he only chose to listen. Sephiroth didn’t listen. He didn’t want to know. He was walking and not listening and at this point, he was so far beyond paying attention to where he was going, or what he was seeing, or hearing, or feeling. Nothing mattered, because if he didn’t make it out of these woods, he was sure he would eventually find out and then –  
  
Sephiroth was once again standing in a clearing. At first, he had tried to convince himself that it was a different clearing, until he saw the indention of two sets of identical footsteps in the moist ground, at points slightly overlapping. Two people had crossed this clearing. Or one person, twice. Closing his eyes and taking a deep, shaking breath, Sephiroth forced himself to turn his gaze upon the sky and when he opened his eyes, there was the moon, its position unchanged.  
  
Sephiroth was once again standing in the clearing – under a pale moon that hang cruelly and mocking in an empty sky. Out of the woodwork, ghosts were calling his name and all sorts of other terrible things, distorted and beckoning and he could do nothing but cover his ears in a desperate attempt to keep himself from listening.  
  
Sephiroth sank to his knees, right at the edge where the forest gave way to this little clearing which had revealed itself to be not his sanctuary, but his cell amidst this never ending labyrinth in which he was entirely lost and alone.  
  
And then he wept. It was the most pathetic he had felt in a very long time. Simultaneously, relieved and desperate, that this display of shame was only between himself, the moon, and the monsters lurking in the dark.  
  
If he could still have mustered the strength to laugh, he would have, but he had nothing left to give. The forest had drained him of everything he had and soon his body would decay, and then it would have devoured him completely. He was for the fungi and the maggots, the mouldy insides of his skull a home for spiders.  
  
This was it then. This was the end - not to perish in one last act of blazing glory on the battle field, but silently, in a cursed and lonely forest, surrounded only by ghosts, with the wind singing him a sombre lullaby, stroking his hair while he succumbed to the cold and the dark, with tears rolling silently down his cheeks. His eyelids felt heavy, he fought to keep them open, until he no longer could and he felt himself fall forward as his eyes closed, falling into eternal slumber, never to be found, never to be woken again. Sephiroth had always suspected he would die alone, he had never suspected to feel –  
  
"Sephiroth!"  
  
Someone was calling his name, and it was the wicked cries of the dreaded spectres. It seemed to come to him from far away, but he was sure, he knew this voice. It was deep, familiar, comforting. Someone was touching his head, but the hand was warm, and the touch was gentle and careful, not tugging at his hair, but carefully sifting through the strands as not to hurt him. A new, unknown melody reached his ears, but it was soothing and beautiful and it nearly made him want to weep again. With each note, the haziness that had warped his perception and his thoughts, evaporated. The haze receded further and further, plucked away the on the strings of a harp, until the veil had been lifted from his mind.  
  
Blinking, Sephiroth opened his eyes and was immediately blinded by the bright daylight, such a stark contrast to the dark that he had left behind. Blurred at first, Angeal's concerned face slowly came into focus and when their eyes met, his strong features softened, and his worry gave way to a small smile.  
  
“Hey,” Angeal said.  
  
Upon realizing, that he was, in fact, out of the forest and Angeal was there, and that he was no longer alone and that he was not dead, Sephiroth tried to sit up, but immediately slumped forward again, were Angeal caught him with a surprised yelp.  
  
“Easy, now.”  
  
He buried his face in the crook of Angeal's neck, taking deep breaths. The memories of the night came flooding back, and he shivered in spite of himself. But feeling Angeal’s steady heartbeat and his warmth helped keeping the worst of the memories at bay. With each breath, he drew in Angeal's scent and it helped to lessen the lingering smell of decaying leaves and muddy earth.  
  
“Everything's okay. You're safe.”  
  
_Safe._  
  
In view of the past night, that almost sounded too good to be true, but if it was Angeal saying these things, Sephiroth believed it. It was always so easy to trust in Angeal’s simple sincerity.  
  
He was safe. The realization slowly began to sink in and with it, a strong wave of relief came rushing over Sephiroth, and this in turn brought the tears back to the surface and together they all washed out the terrors of the night. Right now, he couldn’t care less, about how he got out of the woods, all that mattered was that he had made it out, and that Angeal was there, and that Angeal had the tact not to comment on anything, while he sobbed into his shoulder, drenching the shirt of his SOLDIER uniform with hot tears. Angeal instead just held him and occasionally whispered reassuringly against his hair, gentle words that really meant nothing – except that, to Sephiroth, in this moment, they meant everything.  
  
Angeal only held him tighter, stroking over his back, and along his upper arms, shushing him, telling him that he was going to be okay, until his crying had ceased and his body was merely shook by small shudders as his breathing adapted to normal.  
  
“Hey,” Sephiroth finally mimicked, when he trusted his voice enough to speak, although it was barely more than a whisper against Angeal’s neck. He didn’t like how it sounded, weak and, admittedly, pathetic. Hell, in this moment, everything about him was pathetic.  
  
After a few more moments of letting himself be pathetic for once, Sephiroth untangled himself from Angeal, who let him go, albeit a bit reluctantly, to finally take in the surroundings. They were inside a small clearing at the edge of a forest, not far-off a path leading through the woods into the wide-open landscape that lay beyond its bounds. An early midday sun was shining and its rays fell light and warm upon his skin.  
  
“What happened?” Sephiroth asked, his voice sounding coarse. Angeal let out a sigh of relief, hugged him once again, and then began to explain.  
  
And so, Sephiroth was given the full picture of what had happened to him. He had been sent out on a mission near the premises of the Sleeping Forest, that much he had remembered on his own, once the forest’s enchanting effects had worn off. However - whoever had been responsible for writing the assignment, had failed to provide him with neither enough information, nor the proper equipment to protect him from the forest’s illusionary qualitities. It had been an honest fuck-up, as Angeal had called it, his expression grim. Wandering just a tad too close towards the forest’s edge, Sephiroth had been lured inside and trapped in its spell for what he eventually had learned to have been three days. Luckily, his superiors – Lazard specifically, Angeal was quick to point out – had noticed the mistake, when Sephiroth had failed to report back, which had been unusual enough to immediately warrant sending out Angeal, who was deployed on an unrelated mission close by, to venture out into the forest to find him. Someone had gotten fired for this. Sephiroth couldn’t care less. Unanimously, it had been decided by the Shin-Ra higher-ups, that the whole incident had to be kept under wrap. A decision that surprised nobody and massively annoyed Genesis, who, despite all his prying, never got a clear answer out of neither Angeal, nor Sephiroth to what exactly had happened on this mission.  
  
Even years later – and even though he would never dare to speak it out loud – it would remain a shared and well-kept secret, between him and Angeal alone, who just understood him in his earnest and non-judgemental way, that in this one night that he had spent trapped in the illusions of the Sleeping Forest, Sephiroth had genuinely been afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> That was it, the fic I liked to call "Local man lost in forest, nothing happens".  
> I am clearly here to provide the content absolutely no one has ever asked for.
> 
> But let me be honest, it was completely self-indulgent anyways, and I had so much fun with it and I think you can tell, because it turned into ~4k words of...whatever this was?
> 
> This has a soft ending, because I was feeling it. Just, some good old tenderness after some ultimately harmless spooks.
> 
> A significantly shorter fic for Day 3 has also been written.  
> (Stay tuned for my least favourite among my entries for Sephiroth Week 2020.)
> 
> Any type of feedback, comments, kudos are highly appreciated, as always. Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Feel free to hit me up on Twitter under @FL3ANC3! Talk to me about FFVII, or fall season, or the theory of Gothic fiction!


End file.
